Maria grunted. Swinging her legs over the side of the truckle bed, she stood up. Her nightgown was soaked with blood. In the hollow her body had left in the bed, Robert yawned. She sat down again and dragged him into her lap.
“Where is Richard?”
“I don’t know, somewhere below Iste—I sent a rider to him, when the—when—before.”
Eleanor came in the door and hurried up to Maria’s side. “Can you not let her sleep?” She hugged Maria tight as a mother.
“Sssh.” Maria put her hand on Eleanor’s arm. “Roger, you must take every knight to Birnia, in case it is Theobald attacking us.” She gave Robert to Eleanor.
“That leaves you with no one to protect you,” he said.
“Richard will come back.” Rising, she got her cloak from the bedpost and shrugged it around her.
Roger sprang to his feet. “God’s blood, you are valiant. I love you for it.” He turned toward the door. Going out, he wheeled toward her. “I swear to you, Theobald won’t slip past us, however great his army.” He rushed off down the stairs.
Eleanor came up to her. “He could have decided that himself, he did not have to wake you.”
“Oh, well. Now that I am up—” She went to the cupboard for fresh clothes. She did not look at the empty bed.
Before moonrise, Roger led all the men north. Maria went to the gate to make sure it was closed and barred. The night air was stagnant, full of unpleasant smells. Clouds obscured great patches of the sky. The people she saw peered at her, curious, and, when she looked at them, jerked their faces into false masks of sympathy. She looked away, unreasonably angry. She got the six knights’ boys out of their tower and set them on watch and went back to the hall.
She caught herself listening for the dead child’s voice. Her eyes burned. She fled upstairs to her room, and, crumpled on the bed, she wept painfully until her eyes were dry. Eleanor was feeding Robert before the hearth. He burst into tears, refusing to drink. Eleanor threw down the little wooden cup. She set Robert on the floor and paced around the room.
“Where is she?” Maria called. “Where did they take her?”
Eleanor came over and sat down on the bed. She stroked Maria’s hair away from heir face. “In the village. They will see to everything.”
“When Richard comes back, we will bury her.”
“Don’t think of it. Put your mind elsewhere.”
“Where?” Maria masked her face in her arms.
***
In the morning, another messenger came from William: Theobald was attacking Birnia with a great force of men. William had garrisoned the Tower, but needed more help at once. Maria fed the messenger and sent him to the Knights’ Tower to sleep. With Eleanor and Robert she leaned out the window, looking anxiously south. She had gotten no word from Richard since before she fell sick. If the Tower of Birnia fell, nothing would lie between Theobald and Maria’s castle but fields and open roads.
“Richard will be here at noon,” she said. “Meanwhile we must get ready for a siege.”
She left Eleanor to take charge of the castle, the cook to help her, and brought the villagers up behind the curtain wall and set them to gathering stones. With Robert, she sat on the slope and kept watch; she cast about for some shrewd lie to use when noon arrived and Richard did not. To her surprise, however, he appeared in the mid-morning, leading a double column of his knights up the road, a train of eight mules in their midst.
Maria left Robert on the ground. She walked quickly across the steep slope toward the road. Richard reined his horse around to meet her and dismounted. Maria stretched her arms out blindly toward him. He pulled her against him, pressing her so tight against him that she could scarcely breathe. The doubled rings of his hauberk bit into her arms.
“Are you all right?” he said. He pushed her away from him, holding her away from him at arm’s length. “What’s all this here?”
Maria told him about Theobald. “Until you came there wasn’t a single knight here—The only weapons we have are the stones on the hillside.”
Richard pushed back the hood of his mail. He used three or four of his favorite obscenities against Theobald. Abruptly he cursed God, with a vehemence that made her flinch. His voice shook. She turned away from him, cold.
“Go get me a fresh horse,” he said. “And my fur cloak, I damned nearly froze to death at Iste.” He bellowed to his knights, still waiting in their columns along the road.
Maria led his horse on up toward the castle. In the gateway, she stopped to look behind her. Down on the hillside, Richard was sitting with Robert in his lap, searching through her basket. While she watched, he found the cheese and meat she had brought for her dinner. She took the horse into the ward.
Eleanor helped her find his fur cloak. They packed a roast hen and a leather bottle of wine for him and brought the bundle out into the ward. The knights wandered in and out, feeding themselves, getting new gear and horses, and carrying the full baskets of stones onto the top of the wall. Richard stayed outside on the hill.
Maria took the fresh horse down to him. He sat staring north, his jaws working steadily through the last mouthful of cheese. He was sun-darkened like a plowman, his eyes were pale as quartz. Robert crawled around him tearing up clumps of grass to eat. Dirt covered the little boy’s face. He beamed up at Maria when she approached him. Richard did not move.
Maria sat down beside him. He said nothing and hardly glanced at her. His knights were already spilling down the road, their voices quiet. They would know, by now, everybody would know that Ceci was dead.
Richard turned to Robert and kissed him, a loud smack on the side of the head. With the little boy in his arms, he rose and, when Maria stood, thrust the child toward her.
“Richard,” she said. She did not know how to ask him for comfort.
He took a step away from her. “Don’t speak of it,” he said. “Please, Maria. Please.” His hands out, pleading, he backed away from her, went to his horse, and mounted. Without waving, without calling to her, he rode away down the valley with his knights. She let Robert slide out of her arms. Until the columns of riders had vanished in the trees and hills of the distance, she stood watching him go, amazed that he had left her alone.
***
She had wanted Richard there when Ceci was buried, but obviously he meant not to be, and they could wait no longer. In the evening, after they had made the castle as strong as they could, everyone except one sentry went down to the village to hear the funeral Mass. The people of the village joined them. Many people wept openly. The rumor went among them that it was a bad omen the little girl should die, that evil was about to fall on them. Carrying torches to make their way, they climbed back up the hill to the castle burying ground. The porter and a servant had dug a hole that afternoon, and the village carpenter had made a cross. All the mourners knelt around the flower-filled grave, and Father Simon began the prayers for the newly dead.
Maria closed her ears to the words. Wrapped in linen, the child’s body lay on the ground beside the grave. The flowers tucked in her shroud were already wilting. Maria fell to crying, and Eleanor slid her arm around her waist. Father Simon spoke of the redeeming love of God. Maria knew she was not weeping for her daughter, who was safe in Heaven, but for herself, who had lost the dearest thing in her life.
They lowered the body into the earth and closed up the grave like a mouth. Maria throttled herself silent. If there was a virtue in it anywhere it was to endure it well. She let Eleanor lead her through the bleak torchlight back to the castle.
***
Richard came back with Count Theobald’s son as a hostage and Theobald’s sworn oath not to cross their common boundary for six months. Maria had no idea what to do with the hostage and to her relief Richard gave him into Roger’s keeping. Roger led the boy off. Richard took the stool over to the hearth in their bedroom and sat down before the fire.
Maria could not tell if the firelight alone made his face so gaunt. Sitting down besid
e him, she pulled out her braids so that she could brush her hair. It was late: everyone else was asleep.
“How did you do? Did you fight him? Was Prince Arthur with him?”
“Yes—no.” He hunched his shoulders. “We fought and we talked. Theobald is very good at talking. Of course Arthur was with him, he is Theobald’s thing. I may have given them too much.” He milled the air with his hand. “I can’t do everything at once.”
“What is he like?”
“Who, Theobald? Very good at talking.” Getting up, he took off his shirt. His left side was mottled with yellowing bruises.
“You didn’t give him a hostage, did you?”
“No. But I think we could have gotten more from them—I didn’t know how weak he was. He’d been separated from some of his men. We could have gotten more. I didn’t use the advantage.”
They looked at each other a moment. Wordless, she saw how he cast desperately around for something else to speak of—she realized he would not talk of Ceci. She buried her hands in her lap. “Oh, well,” she said, and knew of nothing to tell him. The silence wore on. Heavily she turned away from him and stared into the fire.
Thirteen
After Ceci’s death, Maria longed for another baby. Robert was too old and active: whenever she tried to coddle him, he pushed her away. Each month while the moon waxed she prayed she was with child, but each month after the full moon she gave off blood. She had never understood before why the village women called the blood the curse of Eve.
In the fall, when she had been barren several months, she spoke roundabout to Father Simon, and something he said suggested to her that she was being punished for murdering Walter Bris, more than two years before. The old priest told her that for the punishment to cease she would have to repent sincerely of her sins, and she prayed every day for the grace to be sorry. She never asked Richard what he thought. The one time she mentioned Ceci to him, he put his back to her and furiously did something else.
As a proof that she was truly sorry, she swore to build a chapel at the Cave of the Virgin. Whenever she grieved for Ceci, she thought of the chapel and her heart lightened. Richard at first would not listen to her. All winter long he and Roger fought the Saracens in the foothills; he was in and out of the castle every few days, arriving usually late at night, turning the whole place over, and leaving the next day before noon, to everybody’s great relief. Then in the spring, after more than a hundred knights had come south to join his army, he seized the last two Saracen fortresses in the lowlands, and on Midsummer’s Day he stormed Iste itself. Exhilarated with this victory, he gave her all the money he had in plunder and let her take the local serfs who had worked on the New Tower for her father.
There were ten of these men. She took them to the Cave of the Virgin, collected a dozen more from the village there, and talked the English monk into sending to the chapterhouse in Agato for a mason. A passionate energy captured her. She went over the countryside talking people into making bricks and cutting lumber. A French pilgrim at the cave knew how to plan for building, and he helped her devise the scheme for the chapel. The pilgrim drew it out on vellum, lingering on at the shrine long past the time when he would have gone on his way to France. He was an interesting man. At night sometimes Maria dreamed lasciviously of him, although in the flesh she was always stiff with him and hardly ever spoke to him alone.
The English monk knew everyone in the region. He found other craftsmen to help her, and many of the local serfs came when they could to work on the chapel. Until the harvests were in, she had only her own men to dig and rake and smooth the ground she had chosen, but once the peasants had their grains and vegetables shored up and their meat salted, they walked with their families to the shrine and fell to work.
All this made her happy as she had ever been since her marriage. But sometimes when she thought of Ceci, she could not help but cry.
The master mason and his apprentices arrived in the balmy warmth of Saint Martin’s summer. The mason, Brother Nicholas, was a large, foul-smelling man, muscular as a knight. The taut skin of his tonsure was bright red from the sun. He prayed overnight in the cave, came out the next morning, tucked up his cassock between his knees, and told Maria she was doing everything wrong. Trailed at a good distance by his helpers, all expert at staying upwind of him, he went around making everything right. When she saw that he could do as well without her, she went back to her castle, which she had left in Eleanor’s keeping.
Richard had just come back from Iste. While with Eleanor’s help Maria took off her traveling clothes and re-introduced herself to Robert, her husband kept off to a corner of their room.
Maria could tell he was angry. Eleanor took Robert downstairs, and Richard turned on her.
“I didn’t marry you to live by myself.”
“You married me to get this castle,” Maria said.
He tramped up to her and stood over her. She thrust her chin out at him. “You married me to get around my father.”
Richard knocked her down. “Don’t talk back to me. I never did anything to your father.” He pushed her with his foot. “Get up.”
Maria lay back on the floor. “I think I’ll stay here, so I will not fall as far when you decide to do it again.”
Richard hauled her up onto her feet. “Shut the door. Everybody for leagues can hear you. You scream like an old gate sometimes.”
Maria slammed the door shut. It rebounded inward. She thrust it closed. Her head throbbed. She went to the window and stood, her heart pounding, her eyes directed out the shuttered window. Richard stamped around the room swearing.
She said, “Why should I have to stay here—you were gone most of the—”
“I came back three times in July and twice in August and you could have managed to be here once. I couldn’t even get my clothes mended.” He threw something violently into the fire.
“If you had told me you were—”
“I shouldn’t have to tell you,” he shouted. “You should be here.”
Maria stared at the wooden shutter. Her cheeks burned from fighting with him. She laid her hand on the cold stone sill.
“Are you finished now?” he said.
She turned toward him. “What?”
“Your church. Did you finish it?”
“No. It’s hardly begun.”
He flung his arms out. “Why now? Why can’t you wait until I don’t have a thousand things to do and a thousand people waiting for me to do one thing wrong? Jesus in Heaven— This place was chaos when you were gone. Can’t you help me even a little? And I never touched your father.”
“If you say so.”
“Are you trying to make me hit you?”
They stared at each other across the room. Maria said, stiff-lipped, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re staying here now. You’re not going back down there. Do you understand me?”
Maria clenched her teeth. She started toward the door. Eleanor knew little of keeping the castle. There was much to be done before winter struck. Richard followed her across the room. When she opened the door, he put his hand on it and slammed it shut again in her face before she could go out.
“Where are you going?”
She made him a deep bow. “I beg your pardon, my most gracious lord, have I your grace’s permission to leave you now?”
He sputtered at her. She pulled his hand off the door, opened it, and went downstairs. In the hall, Eleanor said, in a disapproving voice, “You are scarcely back from the holy place and you are already fighting.”
Roger was in Iste, William in Birnia, and Eleanor did not like to ride. Maria and Richard hunted alone in the snowfields and the wood, after the wolves and foxes that preyed on the herds. Richard set a breakneck pace. Maria had to strain to keep up with him. Their dogs ran one trail due south into the mid-morning, lost it, and cut another almost at once. They galloped through the snow-filled stony woods. The hard exercise filled her with energy. Just after noon, at the foot of a sheer bo
ulder, the wolf turned. Maria wheeled her snorting mare away. The dogs barked and lunged at the wolf’s throat and flanks. Blood splattered the snow and streaked the coarse fur of the wolf. Richard called the pack away. Crouched against the boulder, the wolf snarled breathlessly. Richard put an arrow to his bow and shot. The wolf’s growl ended in a yelp.
The wolfhounds jumped and fought over the body. Dismounting, Richard waded in among them to retrieve his arrow. Maria looked away into the wood. The trees were stark against the snow and the flat gray sky. Her skin still glowed from the excitement of the hard ride. The whining and barking of the dogs made her horse restless, and she started back the way they had come.
Richard followed her. Unspeaking, they quartered through the wood, cutting toward the sea, looking for the wolf’s mate. The empty woods rang with the horses’ hoofs on the rocks. The wind was icy. In the mid-afternoon, the dogs, without running a scent, suddenly brought something to bay in a cleft of the hills ahead of them.
Richard was behind her. Maria galloped up through the trees, hanging onto her saddle in case the mare stumbled. The horse skidded to a stop in the mouth of a brush-choked ravine.
She cried out in surprise. The dogs were holding a man pinned down in the back of the ravine: a Saracen. He fended off the dogs with a long branch. Behind him in the snowy wind drift, another man lay, white as his clothes. Richard drew rein beside her.
Maria called the dogs back. They clustered around her, their eyes and their noses aimed at the Saracens. One or two of the big hounds lay down in the snow. She said, “That man is hurt, or sick.”
Richard and the Saracen with the branch were staring at each other. The wind chilled Maria’s face. The sick man heaved up a cough. She saw blood on his sleeve where he had muffled himself. Richard reached over his shoulder for his bow.
“Richard.” She put her cold hands on the mare’s neck. “They can’t fight back.”
“If that were you and me, they wouldn’t hesitate.”
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